Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 50, No. 5, October 10, 1936
The Devil Laughed
by Robert H. Leitfred
Chapter I
Contact
Ed Kirby cut the air on the pneumatic drill and carried it to the tool shed. The motor on the compressor coughed a couple times then went dead. The day’s work was over. He joined the other workers as they climbed out of the shale-rock excavation sixty feet below the sidewalk level.
From the pocket of his whipcord breeches he took out a hand-kerchief and wiped his moist face. Men were all around him crowding, making coarse jokes and smoking.
Ed nodded casually to some of the workers he had known only a few days. But he didn’t have a word to say to any of them. He merely looked. All day long he had looked at new workers coming on the job, searching for a face stamped on his memory. There was about him an air of infinite patience.
A big man — Kirby, with blond hair, a lean jaw and grayish-blue eyes set deep into cavernous sockets. His upper body was naked and brown. He found his shirt and coat on the upper level and pulled them on.
Then he joined a line in front of the paymaster’s window. He had no pay coming. He got his pay through the Bureau of Criminal Investigation of the Department of Justice. But he received a pay envelope from the clerk behind the tiny window which he shoved carelessly in his pocket. The envelope, he knew, had nothing in it but blank paper. Then he took a position close to a rack of steel girders.
His eyes were on the faces of the men standing in line for their turn at the window. He watched them one after the other until the line had diminished to one man. Then three or four stragglers joined it, one of them in a blue serge suit. At sight of this last man, Ed Kirby suddenly became tense.
His grayish-blue eyes twitched. A grim smile puckered the corners of his lips. Dip Morengo had joined the line. No doubt about the gunman’s identity. Kirby had memorized the man’s face from photographs. He had a thin, pointed nose, bloodless lips, ears that were plastered flat against his head, and there was a slight trace of furtiveness about him. Morengo had come for his pay.
Ed Kirby moved fast — not towards Morengo, but through a gate in the high fence surrounding the excavation. He raised his arm in a pre-arranged signal to two men in police uniforms across the street. They sauntered towards Kirby but seemed wholly unaware of him. Three of the stragglers came through the gate. The officers ignored them. Morengo came through. Kirby’s head nodded ever so slightly.
The men in uniform converged upon Dip Morengo whose eyes slitted as he saw them and guessed their intentions.
“Don’t make any trouble, Morengo,” clipped one of the officers. “You’re coming with us. You’re wanted at headquarters.”
They ran their hands over his body. No guns. They grabbed his arms and hustled him beneath an overhead platform covering the sidewalk towards a side street. Ed Kirby followed close behind. The officers with their prisoner were not moving very fast. Ed overtook them just as they were turning the corner.
From the pocket of his coat he took a vicious-looking leather blackjack. But it wasn’t as formidable as it appeared. There was nothing but soft cotton beneath the leather. He slugged the man on Morengo’s right with the first uplift of his arm. The second officer whirled. The blackjack caught him on the side of the neck, staggering him. Ed socked him again before the officer could recover his balance. He sank to the sidewalk.
“Gee!” snarled Kirby, pocketing the leather weapon, “how I hate these bulls.” He wiped the back of a dirty hand across his mouth. “Beat it, fellow. Move fast, or we’ll get jammed!”
Morengo hadn’t said a word. Half way down the street, Ed Kirby grabbed him by the arm. “Down here,” he said, dragging him into a cluttered alley.
Behind them they could hear a confusion of voices, then the shrill tremolo of a police whistle. Kirby pushed his way through a stack of trash boxes to a screen door: He opened it and crowded through. Morengo came in with him.
They were in a steaming kitchen. A cook turned from his range and nodded to Kirby.
“How are yuh, chef?” Ed called out. “I’m bringing in a friend.”
“Sure,” grinned the rook. “Good supper tonight.”
Ed led the way through a swinging door to the hack part of the eating house. He had taken many meals there and was thoroughly familiar with its arrangements. He waved to a waiter. “Two suppers. Make the service snappy. And a couple bottles of beer.”
The beer came at once. Then hot plates of food.
“Why?” began Morengo, speaking for the first time, “the rush?”
Ed Kirby took a drink of his beer. “Eat, fellow. The cops will be here any minute now — not those I knocked out, but others. Make it look like we’ve been here a long time.”
As they started to eat, two police officers came through the front door. One of them spoke to the cashier. Kirby and Morengo could see the cashier shake his head from side to side. The second officer walked half way back between the tables, shrugged and went forward again. Then they left.
Ed Kirby drank the rest of his beer and lit a cigarette. “Scram, guy! The heat’s cooled off.”
Morengo leaned back in his chair. His slitted eyes studied the gtayish-blue ones of his rescuer. “And who the hell are you?” he asked.
“Kirby,” said Ed, “if it means anything to you.”
“It doesn’t.”
“That’s okay by me. Didn’t expect it would.”
“You working on the Starret job?”
Ed nodded. “Rock driller. Had to grab something in a hurry. Blew into New York again a week ago from the West Coast. Got hot out there, and I figured the change would prolong my health. Grabbed this job till something better comes along.”
“I see.” Dip Morengo relaxed in his chair. “I was on that Starret job myself till last week. I had some back pay coming so I dropped in to get it.”
Ed Kirby said nothing. He hunched down in his chair and stared towards the front windows.
“A driller, eh?” resumed Morengo. “Do any of that work out west?”
“Whose business is it what I did?” Ed’s voice took on a sudden edge.
“Don’t get jumpy, guy. You got me out of a jam. Guys don’t usually slug cops...”
“Me,” broke in Ed Kirby, flatly. “I’d slug a cop any time I had the chance. They rile me — cops and G-men!”
Morengo laid the palm of his right hand on the table and absently tapped the cloth with his fingers. “There might be an opening for you here in this town, Kirby.”
“Ummm!”
“Where you staying?”
“Blackmoor Hotel.”
“That’s a dive. A guy with ability ought to have an apartment with a swell-looking moll running the place.”
“Not on a driller’s pay.”
A thin laugh parted Morengo’s bloodless lips. “Guys in this town call me Dip Morengo. But I ain’t no dip, see?”
Ed Kirby didn’t see and said so. “If you ain’t a pickpocket what the hell are you?”
Morengo had no answer to this one. A silence fell between the two men so suddenly brought together. Finally Morengo pushed his chair back. “I’m leaving,” he announced.
Ed Kirby didn’t change his slouched position by as much as a hair. “Oke,” he said.
Morengo got halfway to the cashier’s desk, thought of something, then hurried back. A waiter came to the table. Both reached it at the same time.